When a television viewer watches television, the viewer periodically makes selections to control what is being viewed. The viewer may change to a different channel and program, may choose to channel surf during commercials, may choose to shut down the television equipment and not watch any programming during certain time periods, etc. The sequence of these user commands are known as a clickstream which provides an indication of what the viewer is or is not watching on television when the clickstream is captured in relation to time, current channel before a change, current channel after a change, etc.
Initially, this clickstream was not captured in any way. The behavior of the television viewer was not tracked, and there was no way to identify trends in the behavior of the television viewer without requiring the television viewer to become involved, such as manually recording what the viewer watches or installing special equipment in the home of the viewer specifically for the purpose of tracking what programs the viewer watched.
The introduction of set top boxes that tune in broadcasted channels for the viewer gave rise to a way to track the television watching behavior of the viewer without requiring the viewer to become involved. The set top box receives multiple streams of television programming and executes the commands from the viewer such as channel changes to control which stream is being viewed by the viewer. The set top box may also be provided with clickstream capture functionality so that when the set top box receives a user command, the command is captured and stored within the set top box in addition to being executed within the set top box. In this way, the set top box effectively captures the viewing behaviors of the viewer.
The clickstream that has been captured may then be periodically forwarded from the set top box to a service provider system where it can be put to use. The service provider system may process the clickstream relative to profile information of the viewers producing the clickstreams to produce statistics about television viewing habits, such as statistics based on demographics. The service provider and/or television content providers may then utilize these statistics for various purposes. For instance, this information may be used to determine what television programming to provide to consumers.
While this set top box approach does provide the clickstream capture, it has drawbacks because it requires the set top box of every viewer being tracked to have the ability to record and periodically forward the clickstream information. Additionally, for advanced television networks, the switching between streams of programming may be performed within the television network for a viewer rather than at the set top box such that the set top box only receives a single stream at a time. Thus, the set top box may not include the intelligence to recognize the significance of one user command from another but instead simply transfers the user command to the television network for execution such that the set top box is ineffective at capturing the clickstream.